My Dear Thayer: 

The World’s Work has brought me nothing so good as your letter of yesterday.  When Mrs. Page read it, she shouted “Now that’s it!” For “it” read “truth,” and you will have her meaning and mine.  My thanks you may be sure you have, in great and earnest abundance.

You surprise me in two ways—­(1) that you think as well of the magazine as you do.  If it have half the force and earnestness that you say it has, how happy I shall be, for then it will surely bring something to pass.  The other way in which you surprise me is by the flattering things that you say about my conduct of the Atlantic.  Alas! it was not what you in your kind way say—­no, no.

Of course the World’s Work is not yet by any means what I hope to make it.  But it has this incalculable advantage (to me) over every other magazine in existence:  it is mine (mine and my partners’, i.e., partly mine), and I shall not work to build up a good piece of machinery and then be turned out to graze as an old horse is.  This of course, is selfish and personal—­not wholly selfish either, I think.  I threw down the Atlantic for this reason:  (Consider the history of its editors) Lowell[5] complained bitterly that he was never rewarded properly for the time and work he did; Fields was (in a way) one of its owners; it was sold out from under Howells, etc., etc.  I might (probably should) have been at the mercy completely of owners some day who would have dismissed me for a younger man.  Nearly all hired editors suffer this fate.  My good friends in Boston were sincere in thinking that my day of doom would never come; but they didn’t offer me any guarantee—­part ownership, for instance; and the years go swiftly.  I could afford, of my own volition, to leave the Atlantic.  I couldn’t afford to take permanently the risks that a hired editor must take.  Nor should I ever again have turned my hand to such a task except on a magazine of my own.  I should have sought other employment.  There are many easier and better and more influential things to do—­yet; ten years hence I might have been too old.  Harry Houghton[6] has an old horse thirty years old.  I used to see him grazing sometimes and hear his master’s self-congratulatory explanation of his own kindness to that faithful beast.  In the office of Houghton, Mifflin & Company there is an old man whom I used to see every day—­pensioned, grazing.  Then I would go home and see four bright children.  Three of them are now away from home at school; and the four cost a pretty penny to educate.  My income had been the same for ten years-or very nearly the same.  If I was a “magic” editor, I confess I didn’t see the magic; and there is no power under Heaven or in it that can prove to me that I ought to keep on making magazines as a hired man—­without the common security of permanent service for lack of which nearly